Quotes from work
Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house of Keats and Brown shared in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language."Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem which describes Keats's journey into the state of negative capability. The tone of the poem rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: The Complete Poems
Context: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 3
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“Already with thee! tender is the night.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 4
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 8
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 8
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 5
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 5
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 7
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Context: Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 2
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Context: O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth.
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth.